Having dispatched Aurora, Aunt Perdy bent her gaze once more on Joanna, leaning forward with blazing eyes.

“Where was I, Joanna? Ah yes. When I disobey sweet papa, this is what happens. I go to bed and to sleep. And in my sleep a hand is laid on my shoulder, and a voice says,’ Blot the wicked words of self!’ And still in my sleep I get up, and after climbing down the ladder I remember no more. But when I come down in the morning as usual, I find that all the words that were words of self have been blotted by my own hand.”

When she had listened to the sound of her aunt’s voice for more than two hours, Joanna was near the end of her strength. Supper was long over, Aurora had bidden them good night and gone home; the charcoal no longer glowed in the wells of the stove; the lamp flickered from lack of oil. Wearied out with the last weeks of grief and sleeplessness, with the excitements of the day, with the toiling walk uphill, with the strangeness of everything, Joanna’s head fell upon her breast.

“Dear auntie,” she murmured, raising it with an effort, “I am so terribly, terribly tired.”

“I can see you are exhausted,” replied Perdy, “and exhaustion is a poison. No one ought ever to be exhausted. It is stupidity, nothing else. It comes from not knowing how to rest. That is what poor Henry never could see. He was always wanting to sleep. Now I, since I have learned how to rest – how to relax every nerve and muscle perfectly, as I shall teach you presently – need hardly any sleep. The great thing is to think of your body as a string of beads: then you can give it the rest and refreshment it requires without sleeping for seven or eight hours like a hog.”

Joanna made a final effort to listen. But after some time she only understood dimly that something was being read to her. Aunt Perdy’s voice was like a river flowing through the room, flowing and flowing, and filling the room with waves of sound. And the sound came and went like the noise of a weir in the breeze. At one moment it seemed to Joanna that she was listening to her mother. Yes, that was her mother talking of “poor, poor human nature!” Then it was surely Georgie’s voice, assertive, full of challenging assurance. Now her grandfather, whose voice in the flesh she had never heard, was addressing her from his place on the dark wall. Then again the tones seemed to be the echo of her own secret heart. It was the voice, not of a person but of a family.